Hierarchical LOD

Mar 30, 2013

Hierarchical LOD is now working! This will allow you to create huge, detailed worlds with distant objects in view.

In Kraken, Hierarchical LOD works by breaking up the scene into pieces that are of multiple levels of detail. Only the pieces closest to you will be displayed using the highest detail. Unlike the simple LOD meshes that Kraken already supports, Hierarchical LOD works on entire branches of the scene graph, turning them on and off.

This allows lower LOD levels to have objects grouped together and simplified to use fewer textures and materials without compromising the occlusion and view frustum culling used in the highest LOD levels.

Hierarchical LOD is applied in Kraken by using a new lod_group node with it's max_distance and min_distance attributes. The children of lod_group nodes are only enabled when the origin point of the lod_group is between the two values. By nesting lod_group nodes, the system scales up to very large worlds.